Yeesh, Richard Linklater is really pessimistic about the future of film
An uncharacteristically glum Linklater thinks our “last good era for filmmaking” is over
Aux News Richard Linklater
Richard Linklater has experienced the movie business in all its many forms. Coming up in the Generation X indie boom with influential hangout movies like Slacker and Dazed And Confused, he quickly diversified his resume taking on extremely long-term projects and broad Hollywood comedies. Linklater’s balanced career allowed for expansive passion projects (Before trilogy and Boyhood) and experiments (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly) while also dropping a School Of Rock every so often. He’s long had a good handle on the industry and how to make commercially viable entertainment that satisfies personal artistic goals. Yet, in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Linklater paints an uncharacteristically pessimistic view of the industry.
Linklater, who is coming off a career-high Venice premiere of his latest film Hit Man, thinks the last “good era of filmmaking” is over, that “it’s gone with the wind—or gone with the algorithm.” It’s not uncommon for elder statesmen to bemoan modern circumstances. He wouldn’t be the first to say that the opportunities afforded to him at the beginning of his career no longer exist. Indeed, he says his contemporaries from the ‘90s will tell him, “Oh my God, we could never get that done today.” “Selfishly,” he believes that he feels lucky that he “was able to participate in what always feels like the last good era for filmmaking.” However, he does hope to be wrong.
Linklater admits that “distribution has fallen off” but mostly wonders, “Is there a new generation that really values cinema anymore?” The director runs a film society in Austin, giving him a chance to talk to “cinema-loving kids who have the Criterion Channel and they watch all kinds of amazing movies,” but he acknowledges that that is “the exception.”
Though he would know better than most, hasn’t that always been the case? Haven’t fans of art house cinema always been in the minority? There are cases where art and indie movies have broken through the noise, and there are examples of that today; Skinamarink, one of the most avantgarde and inscrutable horror films to ever play an AMC screen, managed to pull in $2 million in less than 1,000 theaters. While there is anecdotal evidence against what he’s saying, his sentiments are hard to ignore. Even with some successes, the industry appears to be in freefall.
“I fear that there’s not enough of a critical mass in the culture to sustain what was,” he said. “But who knows? I don’t think I have any deeper analysis than anyone else would, and it’s not in my nature to make huge statements about whether it’s all over. I just feel we’re all treading water and hoping we don’t drown. Challenging times are certainly here.”
“It’s really all of our modern cultural life”
He does have a more substantial point when talking about the role of tech in cinema and how Silicon Valley’s vulture capitalism has infected art with “content.” By collapsing everything into a single, disposable phrase that could be applied to anything, from literature to TikToks of wives protecting their porn-addict husbands from the nude scenes in Oppenheimer, tech-led and tech-chasing studios have cheapened all their products. “It’s hard to imagine indie cinema, in particular, having the cultural relevance that it did,” Linklater says. “It’s hard to imagine the whole culture is going to be on the same page about anything, much less filmmaking.”
That flattening, Linklater believes, is a cultural problem extending far beyond the movie theater. He says:
“We can be self-absorbed and say it’s just about cinema, but it’s really all of our modern cultural life. You could say the same things about reading books. A lot of young people can’t really read a book because they’re just on their phones. Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain. I think that’s just how we’ve given over our lives, largely, to this thing that depletes the need for curating and filling ourselves up with meaning from art and fictional worlds. That need has been filled up with — let’s face it — advanced delivery systems for advertising. It’s sad, but what can you do?”
Ever the optimist, Linklater does offer some words of encouragement for us unfortunate peons saddled with a dying culture. “I also don’t want to go through life thinking our best days are behind us,” he said. “That’s just not productive. So, in your own area, you just have to persist and do what you can on behalf of the things that you believe in. You have to believe that everything can change and that things can go back to being a little better. Isn’t that what we all want for everything these days, from democracy on down? Can’t we just go back to being a little better?”
Of course, for his part, Linklater continues to persist. As always, he has several projects in the hopper, including the wide release of his now-buzzy Hit Man and a Boyhood-esque adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along, which he’s shooting over a 20-year production. Honestly, as long as Linklater can still do stuff like that, there’s reason to have hope for the future.
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Though he would know better than most, hasn’t that always been the case? Haven’t fans of art house cinema always been in the minority?That’s absolutely true. I think the difference is that art house cinema historically has enjoyed an outsized influence on pop culture. Even if most people didn’t, for example, go see Taxi Driver, it still had a big impact in circles and institutions that we would probably consider the “gatekeepers.” It influenced new generations of filmmakers, and that further enhanced the impact it left on culture.Today the fact is, that art house cinema is still enjoyed by a minority. I would guess even a bigger minority than in the 70’s. But that minority is just that now: the minority. They don’t have as strong an influence on pop culture anymore.Some of that is thanks to media conglomeration. Some of it is thanks to Silicon Valley. Some of it is the fact that our culture is no longer as monolithic as it used to be (which I don’t believe is inherently a bad thing). It’s indirectly because of a lot of things. It’s kind of a Rorschach test. You can blame it on almost anything you want to, really.But Linklater’s not wrong.
Who believes a less monolithic culture is an inherently bad thing?
Ron DeSantis.
When it comes to various artforms, theres a legitmate argument to be made about dilution. The internet IS a great unifier. Which leads to a flattening, an “embeigening” if you will, of culture and art.
There are always going to be unforeseen negatives to any huge shift of communication. The best we can do is engage in preservation, so our art isn’t actively destroyed (see: fascists, zealots, anti-intellectual chuds, etc.) or just lost to history.
But the creation of new sub-cultures, communities, languages, perspectives is constant right? We’re all still living through it, so the positives may or may not outweigh the negatives, for us, for posterity. But I think we can acknowledge we’re losing a lot in the process, to better preserve and honor what’s come before. History matters.
Look at A24. Their movies aren’t the biggest hits, but they have an outsized effect on the culture. How many people actually saw Midsommar or Ladybird? Probably around the same amount that saw Taxi Driver.
I’m really not sure that that’s true. I think a reader that visits the AV Club (and really anyone that is Extremely Online) is more likely to believe those movies have had an outsized effect on the culture, but I don’t know if there’s a good way to measure whether that’s true.Midsommar perhaps, because horror movies are still an incredibly popular genre, but Lady Bird? What effect did it leave on the culture? Are people making TikTok parodies of Lady Bird?At the risk of undermining my own argument though, A24 as an overall brand does seem to be punching above its own weight in terms of cultural impact compared to its box office revenues.
Ladybird was a bad example. But Ex Machina, Uncut Gems, and Talk To Me are very much still in the cultural conversation.Taxi Driver got its biggest publicity boost from De Niro winning an Oscar for it, and A24 is no stranger to the Oscars. Until the Will Smith slap the Moonlight mixup was the most exciting thing to happen at the ceremony in years. Everything Everywhere All At Once, Room, and The Florida Project all made splash there as well.
Like I said, I agree with you in that A24 itself has an outsized effect on the culture, but I’m not as convinced that the movies themselves have had the same effect. For example, you bring up the Oscars, but viewership has plummeting for years (as has most other industry awards shows). And while I’m sure people have been questioning their relevance for decades, those complaints have never felt more warranted. At the same time the Academy has been making changes to appeal to a wider audience, people continue to complain that genre movies are snubbed. At a time when it has never been easier to see an independent art film nominated for however many awards, people complain that the Academy doesn’t recognize widely-seen crowd-pleasing movies.And then there’s the movies that win Oscars themselves. Moonlight’s Oscar win was notable mainly for the mixup that happened on live TV. Room was fantastic, but it’s not really part of the cultural conversation anymore. Nor is The Florida Project. The movies that seem to have any lasting power in the cultural conversation are mostly the kind of genre movies (horror, sci-fi, etc.) that typically have a wide appeal anyway, like EEAAO.I’m sure there are other exceptions, but at least IMO, that’s the direction that the film industry is trending towards. The little artsy films about the human condition will still exist, but despite being able to be viewed by a larger audience than ever before in history, their impact on the culture will be smaller than ever.
I disagree that Moonlight’s win was only significant for the on screen mix up. It was a big win for A24, a big win for LGBT representation in the black community, and launched Mahershala Ali’s career to another level. Room similarly gave Brie Larson a bump, and where I live people refer to kidnapping as getting “roomed.” I have family in Florida right near Disney World, so The Florida Project comes up quite a lot, but maybe that’s just me. I completely agree that the genre movies are the ones that have lasting power in the cultural conversation, but what do you consider Taxi Driver? It’s a revenge film about a vigilante with a violent shootout at the end. Of course that was more popular than a mediation on black queerness or an examination on the havoc large corporations reek on the lives of the working poor who live near their theme parks.I thikn you’re comparing Taxi Driver to the wrong stuff. Within a year of when Taxi Driver came out there were other more popular movies that have had a much bigger effect on the culture, such as Jaws, Rocky, and Star Wars. There were also much smaller, artier films like Eraserhead, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Nashville that are closer to the bulk of A24 output, but don’t have anywhere near the mainstream recognition.
You’re right: something like Eraserhead would have been a much better example of what I think of as an art house movie that has an outsized effect on culture. I also acknowledge that both of those movies are almost fifty years old, so there’s plenty of time to gauge their effect, whereas something like The Florida Project is only 6 years old. That’s not fair. So I hope you take this debate in the spirit I intend, not an academic argument I’m committed to. I really don’t have or know of a good way to objectively measure cultural influence.You bring up having family in Florida, and I’d point out that, to my point about culture being less monolithic, I think Florida culture is a thing. I think many metropolitan cities have what they consider their own culture. There are so many groups creating their own cultures through social media, so I think it’s completely possible for a tiny art film to still have an outsized effect on a culture. I’m just less convinced than ever that there’s an all-encompassing culture anymore.
I’m quite enjoying this debate. It’s nice to talk to someone who thinks this deeply about issues like this, especially since you don’t have a committed argument. It’s fun to just take a side and see where you can get with it. I’m not totally convinced of my own side, but it’s a good exercise to look into the issue and see if you can justify your original opinion.My family in Florida are just snowbirds, so they’re not really a part of the actual culture. They’re just Canadians who live in a retirement community near Orlando half the year. We’re more like tourists gawking at the locals. I’m of two minds about an all-encompassing culture. The mono-culture of pre-internet days is gone, because control over media output is in the hands of so many more people now. We have many more avenues to experience film/video culture that aren’t just movies/TV/museums. But new avenues for video has produced different forms of content, especially short form.But at the same time we still have gigantic movies like Endgame and huge artists like Taylor Swift. Everybody saw Get Out. Everybody knows Old Town Road. Culture hasn’t always worked this way. It’s only been in the last 50 years that it’s standard to open a movie at the same time in the entire country. They used to open films in big markets and slowly spread out, and they still do that with a lot of art films. It takes time for small under-performing films to cement their place in the culture. Look at something like Office Space, which was a box office bomb, but now everyone knows Lumberg, Milton, and the jump to conclusions mat. With so much culture to consume today, it takes people longer to come to a consensus about what’s important.
I’d also add that in addition to new forms of video, the video game medium and industry are larger than ever before, and they absolutely take up oxygen in the overall media conversation. The kids that grew up during the generation when 3D gameplay became popularized and standardized are adults now. I’m sure there’s still some stigma around spending all of your time playing video games, but it’s definitely not the niche “nerd” activity it used to be, and hasn’t been for years.So when we (or Richard Linklater) talk about movies and their diminishing impact, I think we have to acknowledge the impact of video games, the same way I’m sure adults read fewer books the more popular film and TV became.
Video games definitely give you more bang for your buck. I’ll bet Linklater’s never played more than Pong.
De Niro didn’t win an Academy Award for Taxi Driver even though he was nominated. He did win for Godfather Part 2 and Raging Bull.
True. I used to know this stuff.
One thing that Ladybird did was open the wave to 2000s nostalgia, which sounded ridiculous at the time. As a GenXer I didn’t get it myself — how can you be nostalgic for 2002? I mean, that was practically yesterday. But obviously younger people don’t feel that way and there’s been multiple period pieces set in the early 21st century.
Taxi Driver wasn’t art house, it was a major release by a major studio and one of the highest grossing movies of the year. That was a very specific cultural moment that ended in the early 1980s, but when people describe “art house” movies they’re usually describing commercially viable movies that made a solid chunk of money for their budgets (Pulp Fiction and Before Sunset also come to mind). I bring this up less to nitpick than to point out that our examples of “art” cinema are often well financed, widely distributed, commercially successful films made with studio backing, and when people complain about studios throwing all their money at franchises and CGI-heavy action comedies, that’s the frame of reference.
If Pulp Fiction can be considered an art house film, I think that further reinforces my point given what a huge impact it had on American culture. But point taken re: Taxi Driver. 23 mil domestic didn’t seem like a lot to me, even for 1976 (the year after Jaws and the year before Star Wars), before I posted my comment, but I was wrong.
I’ve been thinking pretty much the same thing about western culture in general for the last couple of decades. I don’t rule out worthwhile, new forms of art and entertainment at some point down the road when the dust settles but I’m skeptical for so many reasons but mostly it’s the way capitalism has reduced everything to just content and people are just lapping it up. The whole streaming thing, particularly bingeing, is disheartening as hell.
Look, I adore Richard Linklater’s films, but man do I tire of these arguments. Cinema is always evolving, and the one constant, are those who proclaim cinema dead or dying. They said as much when talkies came in. And color. And widescreen. And television. And digital. Cinema evolved, and changed, but that’s what happens with every art form.
And the fact that he’s just repeating criticisms of the culture industry espoused by Adorno and Horkheimer close to 100 years ago when cinema was “better”… yeah… he’s too smart of a dude for this.
But he’s not.
I’d recommend reading what he actually said, rather than what the AV Club headline says he said. He’s not really arguing anything, he’s just musing in a response to a question in an interview, and the vultures who make money through clickbait *cough* are having a field day. So, on the one hand, selfishly, you think, “I guess I was born at the right time. I was able to participate in what always feels like the last good era for filmmaking.” And then you hope for a better day. I fear that there’s not enough of a critical mass in the culture to sustain what was. But who knows? I don’t think I have any deeper analysis than anyone else would, and it’s not in my nature to make huge statements about whether it’s all over.
thank you. he always gives great nuanced interviews and his takes on cinema are very well said.
I mean, sure, maybe ChatGPT can cobble together some cool scripts… or something.
I can see his point of view and yours.
I think the difference this time, whether you think it’s significant or not, is that the new technology isn’t like adding sound or color, it’s removing part (or potentially all) of human input into art making.
Some people would say that’s scaremongering, but of course no one knows how all this will play out. Time will tell.
I think the historical analogy is not the changes in cinema but rather the people who assumed movies were a technological fad that would never supplant real dramatic arts like theater and opera. We’re potentially confronting a similar situation with movies as people increasingly focus on monetized social media content. Personally, I’m convinced that people over 35 don’t consider online content “media consumption” in the same way as watching movies or TV. But that’s only because we’re out of touch, and younger people consider those modes of entertainment more or less of interchangeable.
How would you compare any of the issues he’s talking with to the technical advancements you mentioned? They have nothing to do with each other…
I get that it’s probably a lot harder to get distribution for an indie film these days — you certainly won’t find them at the average multiplex — but, in a way, it’s a lot easier to see indie movies than it was in the 90s thanks to streaming. I think you have to be more proactive in finding them, though. The days of sticking the local indie theater’s monthly schedule to the fridge are gone.
We watched Boyhood again the other night and it seems to get better every time I watch it.
It’s hard to argue against most of Linklater’s observations here, but on the other hand movie making has never been as cheap, easy, and accessible before. I think we may be in the early stages of a massive shift in how movies are distributed, watched, and become (or not) a part of the cultural discourse; that doesn’t mean we’ll only have algorithm-generated product to choose from in the future, though it might mean finding films outside that slurry becomes harder and harder to do.
Yeah, I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, a hundred miles from any Arthouse theater. I think growing up in Austin (if he did) slants his view of The Good Old Days. Thank god for today’s tech.
“cinema-loving kids who have the Criterion Channel and they watch all kinds of amazing movies,”Kids who have the freekin Criterion Channel! He was a kid in the Seventies, before Blockbuster (I think). I don’t see how he just glosses over what a fantastic thing the current tech is for the future of movies.
I think that’s only true if you assume that people’s ambition is to make movies. There are people using their phones and webcams to make very popular entertainment that’s distributed online and consumed by millions of other people, but they aren’t making movies. They’re making feature-length videos about movies, or about Minecraft, but not movies. That form of expression doesn’t resonate with the diy ethos.
Oh, there’s some diy movies. I remember a while back there was a big deal about people shooting movies on their smartphones, some of which even made it to things like Sundance. That really is an amazing democratization of moviemaking given that before, even their cheapest student film needed movie cameras which weren’t cheap to buy or even rent.
My concern is that by focusing on homemade movies, people are deliberately looking away from the actual production and consumption of entertainment in 2023. There are definitely DIY movies, but they’re nowhere near as popular as other DIY media like tiktok or YouTube videos (or megabudget studio movies), and there’s no particular reason to think DIY production is going to tilt back toward features. It isn’t the era of “student films.”
Exactly. There are still some purists who use traditional film stock (Nolan) then there are innovators who embrace digital filmaking completely, like Guillermo del Toro. It’s fast, it’s far cheaper and, in my opinion, quite beautiful. Digital will continue to perfect.
Music is worse off than movies. Rock is dead & rap just repeats the same stuff.
Yeah, they haven’t even invented any new instruments in, like, decades.
What about the Antagonistic Undecagonstring?
Considering humans haven’t developed an extra set of arms to play it, I think the AU is still considered theoretical.
There are still rock bands and innovative hip hop artists.
The only difference is so much has already been done before that it’s obviously harder to make something original.
Going in my mid 40s and I am so into electronic music. What I listen around is not as incredibly sad as in 2004, the year we all got dumb and we were listening to rehashes for so many years and all the experimentation that happened between 1999 and 2003 vanished, but still there is so much lost potential because in this interconnected world we are basically ignoring scenes from Eastern Europe, for example, and promoters/labels are just an excuse to get into a summer festival. And on the 20th year in a row of synthwave can we bury that style forever please.
There’s still plenty of guitar-centered, lyrics-driven music out there.It just gets classified as “Country” or “Americana.”
Nah. There’s great rock out there you just have to make an effort to find it.
So it’s easy to dismiss this as “kids these days” whining, but I think he has a point. My kids and their friends don’t watch movies the way we did. They have more opportunities and choices than I did, but they watch fewer, because it’s all one solid avalanche of “content.” A movie is just one more element of a cinematic universe that spans platforms. Meanwhile they’re busy watching YouTube and TikTok instead.Arthouse cinema was always a minority thing, but media was more clearly segmented and delineated. There was TV, there were movies. There was your local mainstream multiplex, and there was the arthouse theater two towns over, and you knew which was which. Now, they try to segment the audience more precisely, but the content flow is not.
It’s high time for a brand new medium anyway. Movies are over a century old, and TV is nearly at the century mark. All that time has passed and we haven’t developed the next brand new style of story telling. Either somebody needs to build a holodeck, or else build a time machine to go the future where they have holodecks and bring them back to this time.
All that time has passed and we haven’t developed the next brand new style of story telling.
Except for narrative video games, podcasts, online video series, audio books, probably others. And there are narrative AR and VR games, which is about as close to a holodeck as you’ll get today.
“I also don’t want to go through life thinking our best days are behind us”All I’m saying is, I just wanna look back and say that I did it the best I could while I was stuck in this place. Had as much fun as I could when I was stuck in this place. Played as hard as I could when I was stuck in this place… dogged as many chicks as I could when I was stuck in this place!
I think Linklater underestimates how boring the internet has become and will continue to become. AI will become boring. Handcrafted art, warts and all, is evergreen.
The ‘70s hosted some groundbreaking (and shocking) cinema and yet the over-all population wasn’t nearly as ‘educated’, nor was it even remotely ‘woke’ and yet that cinema flourished. I think Linklater is underestimating the younger generation’s appreciation for both cinema and literature. That small clutch of students who watch the Criterion Channel Channel just happens to be the only one he knows. As I’m sure others are saying, the conditions for the emergence of remarkable cinema are not much different than any other era. Good cinema finds a way.
I think you North Americans are not aware at all of how much of indie cinema you lost. You had your John Sayles, your Hal Hartley, your Alan Rudolph, all those weirdos doing weird adventurous stuff which now you can only find out if you follow the horror genre, the only one where experimentation is allowed.
Tell Norma Desmond to calm down. This is mighty rich coming from the guy who paid Patricia Arquette in Subway coupons to star in Boyhood.
‘”A lot of young people can’t really read a book because they’re just on their phones.”’You know along with this school of thought are those who say you can’t surf the web nor post comments without using a computer or a laptop; if you’re on your phone. Which can be categorically wrong if you’re including smartphones which can (AND DO) do both.Also I’d just like to point out that ebook editions of books do exist. Also you can download and read ebooks on your smartphone.Geez, Rich get with the times. Read a cyber-article or two(you know on your smartphone).
‘”Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain.”’Movies can even be shot on a smartphone. For an example of that one needn’t look any further than the Japanese independent film Beyond the infinite two minutes:If you haven’t seen it? You should. As of this post it’s currently available to stream for the low price of free on Tubi TV.